1. Drive A super-slick tour of L.A.’s seedy underbelly, Nicolas Winding Refn’s occasionally gory, often brilliant crime drama is hypnotic. With a stellar lead performance from The Gosler, a stacked roster of supporting actors and a retro synth-heavy soundtrack, Drive is an A-level B-movie.

2. Take Shelter Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon might be the most promising director/actor duo since Scorsese/De Niro, or at least since Tarantino/Thurman. Shannon, star of Nichols’ 2008 debut Shotgun Stories, turns in another compelling performance here as a man plagued by apocalyptic visions. Toss in default actress-of-the-year Jessica Chastain as his concerned wife, and a highly controlled sense of tone and pace, and you have a prime entry in the ultra-intense Shannon canon.

3. The Descendants As always, it was a good year to be George Clooney. While The Ides of March was made for entertaining viewing, it was his role in Alexander Payne’s much-delayed return to the big screen that proved just how precise an actor Clooney can be. As an indifferent father saddled with a half-dozen pieces of very bad news, Hollywood’s favourite bachelor delivers one of the more subtle, affecting performances of his career.

4. Contagion Overlooked by most critics — either due to its early September release or bevy of marquee stars — Steven Soderbergh’s film was smarter, faster and meaner than any thriller this year. For the full paranoia-inducing impact, see it in a crowded theatre while it’s still winter-cold season.

5. The Tree of Life Not quite the masterpiece cinephiles were hoping for, Terrence Malick’s meditation on childhood and the sins of fathers was complex, bold and, more often than not, confounding. Still, there’s no other director out there who’s trying to push the boundaries of film like the madman auteur. Just don’t ask Sean Penn for his opinion.

6. Attack the Block Released in Canada the same weekend as Cowboys & Aliens, Joe Cornish’s dark comedy absolutely destroyed Daniel Craig and Co.’s weak genre mash-up. Following a group of inner-city London teens who battle E.T.s with nothing more than their bikes, pocket knives and wits, the small British film made up for a year’s worth of sloppy Hollywood spectacles.

7. Submarine Every “youth in revolt” film should be so lucky to have Richard Ayoade as its director. To simply call his film quirky would be a mistake, though, since it’s more complex and emotionally layered than the average Wes Anderson rip-off. As the film’s teenage hero, Craig Roberts turns in a rich performance that’s only matched by supporting actors Noah Taylor and Paddy Considine.

8. Bridesmaids Forget the hundreds of insulting “so women are funny” think pieces the film inspired and just concentrate on the inspired comedy of Kristen Wiig and her merry band of food-poisoned revellers.

9. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil Eli Craig’s spin on the slasher genre isn’t the deepest film of the year, but it’s definitely the most fun. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine star as hillbillies mistaken for serial killers by a group of exceptionally clumsy, horror film-schooled teens. What could have been a one-joke premise is twisted into a wickedly clever comedy with bite. And blood. Lots of blood.

10. Shame & Melancholia A perfect double bill for your next date night — if you’re planning to dump someone, that is — these two art-house hits had their flaws but packed such strong, gut-punch lead performances that they were impossible to ignore. In Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama, 2011 MVP Michael Fassbender was riveting, whatever your thoughts on the spare-to-the-extreme movie that surrounded him. The same goes for Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world saga. Although the film suffered from the Swedish provocateur’s typical fixations, Dunst leapfrogged into an entirely new acting tier with her searing turn as a bipolar bride-to-be.

This week’s panel
– Alison Broverman is an arts reporter and playwright. As of print time, she was in perfect health.
– David Fisman is an associate professor of epidemiology and infectious disease physician at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at University of Toronto. He loves studying infectious disease dyanmics. Most of the people he knows think this is creepy.
– Ann McDougall is a Toronto-based writer working on a young adult novel about the aftermath of a pandemic. She reminds you to sneeze on your sleeve.This week’s filmContagion

Alison For a thriller about a mysterious and highly contagious viral pandemic, Contagion was actually kind of … boring. Which I guess is how a real pandemic would be — lots of early freaking out, and then waiting around in your house for a vaccine and not touching anyone. The early illness montages kind of felt like an ad for antibacterial hand cream, but I liked the reasoned approach the film took to the science of it all.

David I loved this movie. It’s basically an impressionistic representation of an epidemic, and just like an impressionist painting, if you look at it really closely it resolves into broad brush strokes, but if you stand back it does a fantastic job of recreating how these situations feel. And part of that, as you say, is this feeling of endlessness … when you’re in the midst of it, it feels like it will be this way forever. I also thought they did a great job of highlighting the fact that it’s not just disease that’s contagious: fear, rumors and crazy behaviors are also “infectious” aspects of any outbreak. As a physician who can’t sit through ER without yelling “it’s not like that” at the TV, I thought it was as realistic as you could reasonably expect a prospective Hollywood blockbuster to be.

Ann It wasn’t so much boredom that struck me, it was a sense of disconnection. The story is told through a huge number of characters — sort of like a Love, Actually for infectious disease. The result is a scattered paranoia that’s probably very much like experiencing a pandemic. Hard to sit through, though, even though the film clocks in at under two hours.Alison I was reassured by the fact that Canada seemed entirely immune to the bat-pig flu — we weren’t on any of the lists of affected cities, and the only mention of us at all was that we might be sending down some more body bags. Seriously, though, I did find it hard to care about any of the characters (except the doctor who discovered the vaccine, and that’s mainly because she was played by the wonderful Jennifer Ehle). I appreciate director Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious scope, but the plot fragments never fit together in a satisfying way, and the movie’s sprawl was ultimately tiresome.

David Hmm. Yes, I see your point. They were mostly rather two-dimensional: the saintly epidemiologist, the false prophet/conspiracy theorist, the hard-nosed lab scientist types, rather than real characters. All of these types do have real-life exemplars: Carlo Urbani (WHO epidemiologist who died of SARS) and Andrew Wakefield (pseudo-scientist anti-vaccine crusader), for example.

Ann It felt to me like everyone in the movie was very quick to riot and loot. Is there historical precedent for that? Did anyone riot during SARS? Or the Spanish Flu? I feel like people would simply hunker down and wait during a pandemic crisis, but maybe I’m being terribly Canadian. We would hunker down, but maybe a less obedient culture wouldn’t.

David It just happened this past winter in Haiti during this year’s cholera epidemic. “Cholera riots” go all the way back to England in the 1830s and Russia in the 1820s. Public health experts do always invoke maintenance of public order as an important component of pandemic planning, and to my mind this makes a lot of sense … the madness of crowds, and all that. I don’t think there’s a Canadian exception to this. If Montreal could burn during the Richard Riot in the 1950s and Vancouver could be trashed over a Stanley Cup loss this year, we have the capacity to get ornery if large numbers of us feel we are in imminent peril and the powers that be aren’t going to help us anymore.

UNPOPPED KERNELS: The panelists discuss the Hollywood docs they’d go to for a checkup (or not!)

David I’ve been able to whittle my list of movie docs down to three favourites, and (this obviously says something about my sense of humour) two of the three are from Mel Brooks movies. My all-time favorite MD movie character is Gene Wilder’s Friedrich Frankenstein III in Young Frankenstein. The Wilder-Marty Feldman pairing as Frankenstein Junior Junor and Igor Junior Junior is something that makes me laugh out loud, still. Wilder is just such a fantastic, earnest straight-man. The other Mel Brooks doc I love was Dr. Richard Thorndyke, played by Brooks himself in High Anxiety. Full disclosure: my parents are both psychiatrists, as was Dr. Thorndyke, and a scene like this really hits me where I live. I think medicine sometimes lends itself to humor because we’ve developed a complex, science-y sounding vocabulary to describe some of the really gritty, down-n-dirty realities of human existence, and the disconnect between the sound of the language and the image of what the language conveys can provoke laughter. (Not always, sometimes the opposite). My other favorite is the portrayal of Dr. Robert Gallo by Alan Alda in And The Band Played On. I don’t know Dr. Gallo, so can’t really comment on the accuracy of the portrayal, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years with ties of one kind or another to medical schools, this rings true as a portrayal of a certain flavor of creepy biomedical scientist.

Ann My favourite film doctor is, of course, Leonard “Bones” McCoy. I’ve always liked the moment in Star Trek IV when he travels to 1986, meets a cancer patient on a bus and exclaims “chemotherapy? That’s barbaric!” before slipping him some kind of futuristic pill. He’s also great in the (breathtakingly sexist) classic series.

At the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, after the furry primates have made their big stand on the Golden Gate Bridge, we’re treated to a brief coda that suggests a virulent disease razoring through the human populace, carried on the wings of commercial aircraft. Who knew the sequel would open a mere month later?

That’s essentially where Contagion begins, with Gwyneth Paltrow as Beth Emhoff, a woman flying home to Minneapolis through Chicago after a business trip in Hong Kong. Her slightly sniffly demeanour is the first sign that something’s amiss; her quick death a few short scenes later is the second. Her husband (Matt Damon) is left to try to figure out what happened.

Fortunately, he’s not alone. Quicker than you can say SARS, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and (for good measure) Homeland Security swing into action. “Should I call someone?” says a shocked autopsy physician, staring into the late Beth’s cranial cavity. Replies his superior: “Call everyone.”

“Everyone” includes Laurence Fishburne as a senior CDC doctor; Kate Winslet as his in-the-field epidemiological expert; Marion Cotillard as a WHO researcher trying to track down the source of the disease in Hong Kong; Jennifer Ehle as a bio-geneticist; and Elliott Gould as a flu expert. A few more and you could call the movie Illness Eleven.

Balancing (or rather unbalancing) this stern collection of medical eggheads is Jude Law as a mad blogger with his own bio-hazard suit. His character gets the best name in the picture — Alan Krumwiede — and some of the best lines. “Our immune system is a work in progress,” he says. And “It’s a math problem you can do on a napkin!” This of the rate at which the disease is spreading, a variant on the old shampoo commercial: You’ll infect two people, and so on, and so on … Unfortunately, just because he’s right doesn’t mean he’s not crazy too.

Contagion was directed by Steven Soderbergh, often described as alternating between big-budget crowd-pleasers (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven, etc.) and smaller, more personal projects such as Bubble or And Everything Is Going Fine. But Contagion actually falls into a middle range.

Made for an estimated US$60-million, the movie spends most of its time on matters technical, clinical and scientific. There’s relatively little of the panic, shooting and looting we’ve come to expect from such end-of-the-world movies as I Am Legend and 28 Days Later. There’s a bit of social breakdown, but for the most part the local effects of a pandemic that falls somewhere between the 1918 flu and the Black Death of 1348 seem no worse that a prolonged garbage strike.

Soderbergh knows what he’s doing, mind you. Seeing Contagion in a full cinema, one is all too aware of the close, contagious presence of other human beings. It may be immoral to shout “fire!” in a crowded movie house, but there’s nothing wrong with the film itself doing so.

The ensemble nature of the cast presents some difficulties. Cotillard finds herself trapped in China at one point, and we don’t see her again until the movie is almost over. Still, there’s enough going on with the rest of the characters to keep us (and them) occupied. When Ehle notes that the virus is mutating faster than our ability to figure it out, Fishburne responds dryly: “It doesn’t have anything else to do.”

What emerges in an hour and three quarters is a coolly cautionary tale rather than a thrilling horror. Thankfully, the Rhesus monkeys used as guinea pigs for a possible vaccine do not attain super-intelligence and rise up against their human overlords. But as past plagues have shown us (and no doubt will again), the organisms that present the greatest threat to our survival are those that are too small to see.

The Oscar-winning director did so with the multi-story crime thriller Traffic and the acclaimed procedural Erin Brockovich. The 48-year-old exploits both of those techniques in Contagion, which opens Sept. 9.

In the film about a pandemic sweeping the globe, Matt Damon plays a Minneapolis father and husband who is rocked when his wife and son die from a mysteriously lethal airborne virus.

As Damon’s character tries to protect his remaining daughter, an anxious medical team — Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Laurence Fishburne, among them — desperately set about isolating the bug and developing a vaccine.

In the meantime, an online blogger (Jude Law) stirs up unrest when he claims the government is concealing the origins of the deadly disease and the subsequent cure.

The inter-cutting stories expose the separate dilemmas, but also reveal the paranoia and fear of a world at war with the killer virus. Far-fetched? Not really.

Indeed, timing is everything. And Contagion couldn’t be more timely.

While Soderbergh was in pre-production with the movie, the H1N1 swine-flu outbreak was making headlines and causing panic. More recently, the resurgence of a vaccine-resistant H5N1 bird influenza was being tracked in China and Vietnam.

“Well, I guess we’re going to see if the timing is perfect or not,” says Soderbergh, referring to the reaction of movie fans.

What did amaze the director was how fast the project went into production after Scott Z. Burns completed the script a few years ago.

“Everyone felt there was a place for an ultra-realistic film about this subject,” Soderbergh recalls. “Nobody hesitated. Uncharacteristically, it happened very quickly, considering what the business is like for adult dramas. So it made me feel like maybe we’re on to something.”

And while the pandemic storyline might be a familiar trope, Soderbergh had some ground rules to avoid the tricks.

First, he filmed on location as much as possible, including Hong Kong, San Francisco and in and around Chicago.

To help instil realism, he persuaded National Guard troops to get involved, along with Humvees, troop carriers and Black Hawk helicopters.

“And we decided against going anywhere where one of our characters hasn’t been,” says the director. “No cutting to a city that we’ve never been to, or a group of extras that we don’t know personally.”

It’s a significant limitation for a disaster movie “when you’re trying to give a sense of something that’s happening on a large scale.”

Still, Soderbergh had his reasons for the rules of engagement: “We were trying to have it be epic, and also intimate, at the same time.”

Mostly, the director wanted to get out of the way of the ticking-clock thriller.

“Honestly, I was just trying to keep it very simple,” he says. “And that means the entire film is shot with two lenses, and I wanted every shot — mostly eye-level, and no crane shots — to have a purpose.”

Damon says he was especially relieved that Soderbergh avoided acting cliches, such as when Damon’s character is told his wife has succumbed to the virus, hours after she was admitted to hospital.

“It’s five minutes into the movie,” says Damon, who remembers struggling with the moment.

So he asked Soderbergh what he should do, and was told, “The Slump.”

“Everybody knows The Slump,” the actor says. “Down the hall … you see the guy slump down.”

Both decided on an alternative. The sequence they came up with seems unique, but the denial is, in fact, not uncommon among those receiving unexpected death notices.

Helping, too, with the realism was a professional medical team who acted as advisers during the shoot.

The doctors also confirmed that the pathogen running rampant in the film is a fictional virus, but is “biologically possible.” That information unnerved even Soderbergh.

“Having filmed [Contagion],” he says, “I am always going to be aware of the possibility. And it was fun during a preview [of the movie] to watch the lights come up, and have 400 people realize that they were next to a bunch of strangers, and that they had all touched everything.”

Smiling like a proud filmmaker, he adds, “You could tell they weren’t very happy about it.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/09/07/steven-soderbergh-on-his-topical-thriller-contagion/feed/0stdStevenFalls Arts Preview: The best of the small screen and the big screenhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2011/09/03/falls-arts-preview-television-and-film/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/09/03/falls-arts-preview-television-and-film/#commentsSat, 03 Sep 2011 17:00:26 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=44777

By Mike Doherty

Whether it’s a big screen 3D extravaganza or a small screen obsession that lasts for months, we’ve got you covered below for some of the best coming up in the next several weeks.

TELEVISION

Sept. 13Camelot (CBC). This Canadian/Irish co-production has already been denied a second series, and yet it’s no dud. A fast-paced, slightly campy retelling of the Arthurian legend (shades of Excalibur), it features an all-action Merlin (Joseph Fiennes) and a vampy Morgan Le Fay (Eva Green), and should at least prove an entertaining stand-in before Season 2 of Game of Thrones.Oct. 2-4Prohibition (PBS). Celebrated documentarian Ken Burns claims his three-part series about a dark time in America’s history deals with “single-issue political campaigns,” “smear campaigns during presidential elections” and “a whole group of people who felt they’d lost control of their country and wanted to take it back” — not topical at all, then.Sept. 13 Ringer (Global). Eight years after Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays both lead roles in a doppelganger plot that could be straight out of her soap-opera past. When wealthy, well-heeled Siobhan disappears, twin sister Bridget, a recovering addict who’s witnessed a mob hit, takes over her identity. Before long, she discovers Siobhan has dark secrets — among them, she’s a vampire! (Just kidding.)Sept. 20New Girl (CityTV). Zooey Deschanel’s first starring role is as a girl who, on a massive rebound, watches Dirty Dancing obsessively, sings to herself, dresses ludicrously and takes romantic advice from her three new guy roommates. In a massive departure from this indie darling’s regular casting, her character is quirky, elfin, charming … and dorky!Sept. 26Terra Nova (CityTV). Rescheduled due to production delays, this Steven Spielberg-produced dinosaur show has been dubbed “Land of the Lost Budget” by Internet wags. A family from 2149 travels 85 million years into the past to save Earth from ecological catastrophe. Like Jurassic Park but with one crucial difference: it was filmed in Australia, not Hawaii.

Related

Sept. 9 Contagion (Steven Soderbergh). In Soderbergh’s most star-studded picture since the Ocean’s series, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne and Jude Law combat a pandemic disease that resembles, as one character says, a “weaponized bird flu.” Looks like 2008 meets 2000-and-late.Sept. 16Restless (Gus Van Sant). Enoch (Henry Hopper, Dennis’s son) is a young man who gatecrashes funerals and befriends the ghost of a kamikaze pilot; fittingly, he falls in love with a girl who has terminal cancer (Mia Wasikowska, Alice in Wonderland). The film looks typically macabre for a director who has fictionalized the Columbine murders and Kurt Cobain’s last days — and yet also oddly touching.Sept. 30 Dream House (Jim Sheridan). Newlyweds Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz apparently started dating on the Toronto set of this film — perhaps they were seeking shelter from the creepy atmosphere, or meeting to figure out the plot. The trailer suggests a mix of Amityville and The Shining, with confusion over reality and identity. Expect to be shaken, maybe even stirred.Oct. 28In Time (Andrew Niccol). In a dystopic future, where minutes are the currency and everyone has to pay in order to live beyond 25, Justin Timberlake robs from the rich and gives to the poor. Fresh from playing the president of Facebook in The Social Network, is he being typecast as a thief of time?Nov. 23The Muppets (James Bobin). Kermit and the gang regroup to save their old vaudeville theatre from the clutches of an oil tycoon (Chris Cooper). But will the anarchic forces of Gonzo, Animal, The Swedish Chef, and director Bobin (Da Ali G Show, Flight of the Conchords) be sufficient to combat the blandness of producers Walt Disney Pictures?Sept. 23 The Killer Elite (Gary McKendry). A moustached Clive Owen kidnaps a bearded Robert De Niro, so a scruffy Jason Statham tries to save him. The trailer features The Scorpions’ Rock You Like a Hurricane. Not to be confused with the Sam Peckinpah film of the same name … or a rom-com.Sept. 23Moneyball (Bennett Miller). Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s have yet to capture the American League pennant and haven’t had a winning season since 2006. Thus, a few liberties may be needed to jazz up this film of Michael Lewis’s bestselling book on the sabremetrics GM; casting Brad Pitt as a stats geek is a good start.Oct. 14The Big Year (David Frankel). Mark Obmascki’s book The Big Year is an acclaimed non-fiction tale of competitive birding. To do it justice, DreamWorks has drafted in animal experts Owen Wilson (Marmaduke), Jack Black (Kung Fu Panda), Steve Martin (The Pink Panther) and director David Frankel (Marley & Me). Either it’ll take flight, or there’ll be a turkey sighting this Thanksgiving.Oct. 28Anonymous (Roland Emmerich). The theory that William Shakespeare’s work was actually written by the Earl of Oxford seems the stuff of fusty academic debates, but Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) casts Oxford’s story as an action-packed thriller. Expect more blood than Titus Andronicus, more special effects than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and all the realism of The Tempest.

You want Oscar movies? We’ve got Oscar movies. You want Shakespeare? We’ve got Shakespeare. You want J. Edgar Hoover in a dress? Well, you’re strange, but this is the time for such specialized tastes. After a summer of superheroes and romantic comedy, the fall film season brings some unexpected drama and daring comedy, not to mention that girl with the dragon tattoo. Spoiler alert: The occasional lovesick vampire may also appear.

The Lion King: The Disney classic returns to the big screen for a two-week run, this time in 3D. Outtake: It’s the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film in history. (Sept. 9)

Drive: Ryan Gosling stars as a driver for hire — Hollywood stuntman by day, criminal getaway man by night — and Carey Mulligan plays his lonely neighbour. Outtake: The next project for director Nicolas Winding Refn and Gosling is a remake of Logan’s Run. (Sept. 16)

I Don’t Know How She Does It: Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan star in this comedy about a financial executive who supports her husband and children. Outtake: Co-star Olivia Munn was named sexiest woman alive by Esquire magazine last year. (Sept. 16)

Straw Dogs: In this remake of the 1971 Sam Peckinpah classic, James Marsden and Kate Bosworth play a couple who move from L.A. to the Deep South and run afoul of the locals. Outtake: The original, which starred Dustin Hoffman, was set in England. (Sept. 16)

Moneyball: Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager who built the Oakland A’s baseball team on a budget. Outtake: Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays A’s manager Art Howe, was a talented high-school wrestler. (Sept. 23)

Abduction: Taylor Lautner stars in this thriller about a man who sees his own baby picture on a missing persons website. Outtake: It’s director John Singleton’s first movie since Four Brothers in 2005. (Sept. 23)

Killer Elite: Ex-Navy Seal Jason Statham has to reassemble his team — including mentor Robert De Niro — to take on renegade Clive Owen. Outtake: It’s based on a book by Ranulph Fiennes, second-cousin of Ralph, Joseph and Martha. (Sept. 23)

Dream House: Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz play a couple who move into a house that was the site of a brutal murder. Outtake: Newlyweds Craig and Weisz met on the set of the film. (Sept. 30)

Machine Gun Preacher: Gerard Butler stars as Sam Childers, a real-life outlaw biker who became a saviour of African children. Outtake: The orphanage he founded is the biggest in Southern Sudan. (Sept. 30)

Restless: Gus Van Sant’s movie tells the story of a terminally ill teenage girl who falls in love with a boy who likes to attend funerals. Outtake: The producers include Ron Howard and his daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard. (Sept. 30)

50/50: Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in this comedy about a man who learns he has cancer. Outtake: Co-star Seth Rogen was also in Funny People, another comedy about a man who has cancer. (Sept. 30)

The Ides of March: George Clooney directs this political drama about a young idealistic staff member (Ryan Gosling) who learns about the dirty tricks of politics while working on the campaign of a presidential candidate (Clooney.) Outtake: The film’s Oscar connections include winners Clooney, Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and nominees Gosling and Paul Giamatti. (Oct. 7)

Wanderlust: Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd star in this comedy about a New York City couple who move to a hippie commune. Outtake: Aniston has a topless scene. (Oct. 7)

The Big Year: Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin co-star in a comedy about birdwatchers looking for North American rarities. Outtake: It’s based on a non-fiction book about an annual 365-day birding marathon. (Oct. 14)

Footloose: A dancing city boy comes to a small town where rock music and dancing have been banned. Outtake: Star Kenny Wormald has been dancing since he was six. (Oct. 14)

The Thing: In this prequel to the 1951 horror classic (and its 1982 remake), an alien life form is discovered in the Antarctic. Outtake: Co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead will next be seen in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Oct. 14)

The Skin I Live In: Antonio Banderas stars in Pedro Almodóvar’s film about a plastic surgeon who takes revenge on the man who raped his daughter. Outtake: Banderas got his start in movies when he was discovered by Almodóvar. (Oct. 21)

The Three Musketeers: Paul W.S. Anderson remakes the classic story of 17th-century French swordsmen who united to stop the evil Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz). Outtake: The film reunites co-star Milla Jovovich with Anderson, director of her Resident Evil movies. (Oct. 21)

Anonymous: A historical thriller that postulates that Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) — the Earl of Oxford and the lover of Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) — was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. Outtake: Director Roland Emmerich (best known for blockbusters such as Independence Day) created a CGI version of Elizabethan London. (Oct. 28)

The Rum Diary: Johnny Depp stars in this adaptation of the Hunter S. Thompson book about a rundown newspaper in the Caribbean. Outtake: Depp also played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Oct. 28)

In Time: Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried star in this sci-fi adventure about a future where people stop aging at 25 and must buy more time. Outtake: Olivia Wilde plays Timberlake’s mother. (Oct. 28)

Johnny English Reborn: Rowan Atkinson — Mr. Bean himself — stars as an accidental spy in this spoof about an assassination attempt on the Chinese premier. Outtake: Co-star Rosamund Pike was once a Bond girl (in Die Another Day). (Oct. 28)

NOVEMBER

DreamWorksAn Egyptian police officer catches fire from a fire bomb thrown at police battling demonstrators in Suez on January 27, 2011, demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

Puss In Boots: Antonio Banderas again does the voice in this animated prequel to the Shrek films. Outtake: Director Chris Miller did voices for the Shrek movies, helped write them, and directed the third one. (Nov. 4)

Tower Heist: In Brett Ratner’s comic heist film, a group of victims of a Ponzi scheme — including Ben Stiller — hire crook Eddie Murphy to help them get even. Outtake: This is only the second film for co-star Gabourey Sidibe since her 2009 Oscar nomination for Precious. (Nov. 4)

J. Edgar: Leonardo DiCaprio plays J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s biopic of the gay, cross-dressing G-man in a G-string. Outtake: Armie Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network and co-stars as Hoover’s lover Clyde Tolson, is the great-grandson of industrialist Armand Hammer. (Nov. 11)

Jack and Jill: Adam Sandler plays both Jack and his twin sister Jill in this movie about an obnoxious woman who visits her brother and won’t leave. Outtake: The film marks Regis Philbin’s first onscreen appearance since Dudley Do-Right in 1999. (Nov. 11)

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner return in the second-to-last episode of the saga of a vampire-werewolf-human love triangle. Outtake: Director Bill Condon won an Oscar as screenwriter of Gods and Monsters. (Nov. 18)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Oscar winner Colin Firth stars opposite Gary Oldman in this adaptation of John Le Carré’s classic espionage novel. Oldman plays British spy George Smiley, who comes out of retirement to seek a mole in the secret service. Firth is London Station chief Bill Haydon, who may or may not be the mole. Outtake: It’s a remake of a British TV show by Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, whose own Let the Right One In was remade by Hollywood. (Nov. 18)

My Week with Marilyn: Michelle Williams plays Marilyn Monroe in this based-on-a-true-story film set when Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) co-starred in the 1957 movie The Prince and the Showgirl. Outtake: Scarlett Johansson reportedly turned down the role of Marilyn. (Nov. 18)

The Artist: A black-and-white silent film from France about the advent of talking movies. Outtake: Berenice Bejo, the actress who plays the ingénue, is married to Michel Hazanavicius, who directed. (Nov. 23)

Hugo: Martin Scorsese directs Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen and others in this adventure, based on a book, about an orphan who lives in the walls of the Paris train station in 1930. Outtake: It’s Scorsese’s first film in nine years that doesn’t star Leonardo DiCaprio. (Nov. 23)

The Muppets: Muppet fans Jason Segel and Amy Adams have to save the Muppet theatre and help Kermit reunite the gang. Outtakes: It’s the first Muppets theatrical film in 12 years. (Nov. 23)

Carnage: Roman Polanski’s drama stars Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly in a story about parents meeting over a schoolyard brawl. Outtake: The film is based on the play God of Carnage that won the 2009 Tony award. (Nov. 25)

DECEMBER

Paramount PicturesEgyptian police battle demonstrators in Suez on January 27, 2011 demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

New Year’s Eve: Robert De Niro, Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Josh Duhamel, Zac Efron, Jessica Biel, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, Halle Berry, Sarah Jessica Parker and more star in this romance set on the night of Dec. 31. Outtake: Director Garry Marshall has recalled many of the cast members from his 2010 hit Valentine’s Day. (Dec. 9)

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson, this time taking on the evil Professor Moriarty. Outtake: Swedish actress Noomi Rapace — Lisbeth Salander in the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies — makes her Hollywood debut. (Dec. 16)

Young Adult: Charlize Theron stars in Jason Reitman’s film about a divorced writer who goes in search of her happily married ex-boyfriend. Outtake: Reitman reunites with Juno writer Diablo Cody. (Dec. 16)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Daniel Craig is Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara is Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s version of the bestselling Swedish mystery. Outtake: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence were also considered for the Salander role. (Dec. 21)

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol: Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt in a story of how the IMF force is accused of terrorism. Outtake: Co-star Jeremy Renner is being groomed as Cruise’s eventual replacement in the franchise. (Dec. 21)

The Adventures of Tintin: Steven Spielberg’s motion-capture film about the adventures of a young reporter features Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg and motion-capture guru Andy Serkis. Outtake: The Tintin comic books have sold 350 million copies worldwide. (Dec. 23)

We Bought a Zoo: Cameron Crowe directs Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson and Elle Fanning in a story about a family that rescues a failing zoo. Outtake: It’s based on the true story of a widower who bought a zoo in honour of his dead wife. (Dec. 23)

War Horse: Steven Spielberg’s epic looks at the journey of a horse through the years of the First World War. Outtake: The story — based on a bestselling book — was also turned into a Tony-winning Broadway play. (Dec. 28)

“Inspiration can strike at any time,” says a smiling Damon, looking over at a bald Steven Soderbergh during a news conference for their latest collaboration, Contagion.

Soderbergh denies he’s put a spell on Damon, but the director admits he does like to pique his interest with acting challenges.

Besides, Damon’s new look is really for the Neill Blomkamp sci-fi film, Elysium, which he’s shooting in Vancouver over the next four months.

Still, when push comes to shoving Damon in the Soderbergh direction, the 40-year-old actor agrees he has an irresistible impulse to follow the director wherever he wants him to go.

Take, for instance, Damon’s role as the lover of Liberace (Michael Douglas) in Soderbergh’s biopic of the legendary Las Vegas performer, which should begin filming next year.

Previously, he teamed up with Soderbergh on the three Ocean’s crime-caper movies, which scooped up a total of US$1.13-billion worldwide. And he starred in the director’s dark comedy, The Informant! which received great reviews a few years ago.

They’ve again joined creative forces, for the thriller Contagion, which opens Sept. 9.

In the film, Damon plays a Minneapolis family man trying to cope with a deadly airborne virus that is rapidly eliminating the world’s population.

But it is Damon who leads the way, as the husband and father who, in rapid succession, loses his wife and son to the deadly virus, then tries to survive with his daughter as panic ensues.

The movie works as a ticking-clock cautionary tale, which was clear to Damon after Soderbergh showed him the screenplay written by The Informant! writer Scott Z. Burns.

“When I read it, I just thought, ‘I really want to be in this movie,’” Damon remembers . “It was terrific, and riveting, a really fast read, and really exciting and really horrifying. But it manages to be kind of touching, too.”

It ended up being timely, as well. While in pre-production for Contagion, the H1N1 swine-flu outbreak was making headlines. Now, just before the movie’s release, the resurgence of the H5N1 bird influenza is being confirmed in China and Vietnam.

As a father to four daughters, Damon says he instantly related to the protective nature of his character in the film.

“I’m probably more protective than I’ve ever been, now that I have children,” says the actor. “I mean, my wife’s nickname for me is ‘Red Alert.’ I sometimes just check to see if the kids are breathing.”

Of course, he also found comfort in the fact that he understands the Soderbergh method, and his uniquely straightforward style of filmmaking.

“Working with Steven is very different from working with anybody else,” says Damon. “He takes the hocus-pocus out of making movies.”

And while there are some references to government control as the global pandemic intensifies in Contagion, Damon insists that little should be inferred from the fact that his guy borrows a neighbour’s shotgun when police protection breaks down.

“I was very aware, in the second act, that this is taking place,” Damon says, then jokes, “That would usually be about where the zombies would come, and you’re going to want a gun for that. I don’t care who you are.”

It’s his cheeky way of saying that the gun-toting sequence is not a political statement at all.

In other words, the actor is refusing to take himself too seriously after more than 20 years in the business.

Certainly, he’s enjoyed good times, professionally, since his high-profile breakout with 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which earned him a best-actor Oscar nomination and a screenplay Academy Award he shares with buddy Ben Affleck.

Besides co-starring opposite George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen hits, he enjoyed A-level status with performances in Clooney’s Syriana, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, and the Robert De Niro-directed The Good Shepherd.

He became a box-office force with the Bourne series of spy thrillers, although he confirms he won’t be returning for the fourth, The Bourne Legacy.

He earned another Oscar nomination for his South African rugby player in Clint Eastwood’s 2009 picture Invictus, and he enjoyed great notices for his role as a clairvoyant in Eastwood’s Hereafter, as well as praise for his performance as the talkative Texas Ranger in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit.

He’s not always the serious sort, however. He exercised his comedy chops playing Carol, Liz Lemon’s pilot-boyfriend on the sitcom 30 Rock last season.

So what’s the deal? Is Damon a comic, a character actor or an action star?

Remember 2004, the year Jude Law was in everything? I Heart Huckabees, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Alfie, Closer, The Aviator, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. You name it, he was in it. Chris Rock made sport of him at the Oscars that year, and Law was allegedly upset, crying all the way to the bank.

The British actor has backed off a bit since then — last year, for instance, he was in just one film, Repo Men, which almost nobody saw. But this fall he’s back with a vengeance — and an epidemic, and a mystery.

Related

First up, Contagion, opening in September, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon and Law’s SkyCaptain co-star Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s about an epidemic that threatens to wipe out humanity, a plot we’ve seen more times than we saw Law seven years ago. Quarantine, Resident Evil, The Andromeda Strain, 28 Days Later, 12 Monkeys, I Am Legend, Outbreak, etc.

So, what does Contagion have that they don’t? (And how can I avoid catching it?) It has Law doing the math. Listen to him in the trailer: “On day one, there were two people, and then four, and then 16. In three months, it’s a billion. That’s where we’re headed!” Sounds like an evil shampoo commercial from the ’70s.

In December, Law returns as Dr. John Watson, right-hand man and straight man to Robert Downey Jr., who plays Sherlock Holmes in A Game of Shadows. This one also features Noomi Rapace (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Jared Harris as Professor Moriarty, and a lot of gunplay from Law, who at one point has to remind his friend: “I’m on my honeymoon!”

Between these two, opening in November, we find Law as the loving father of Hugo Cabret in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, based on Brian Selznick’s book. The trailer features some beautiful shots of early 20th-century Paris, steampunk robots, train wrecks and Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) as a clumsy police officer.

Not a lot of Law, however. In fact, the trailer makes it pretty clear that he dies in the first act. But maybe that’s just as well. He wouldn’t want to overstay his welcome — again.

You can watch the trailer for all the films mentioned at apple.com/trailers. Video versions of this and past Trailer Trackers are at nationalpost.com/theampersand.

In Steven Soderbergh’s deadly-disease thriller Contagion, Gwyneth Paltrow catches bird flu. And dies. No spoilers here, by the way: that’s the whole point of the film, which shows everyone’s favourite lifestyle dictator catching a “lethal airborne virus” that slowly nabs epidemic status as it kills more and more people. Meanwhile, distraught husband Matt Damon, the medical community and other Very Important People played by the likes of Kate Winslet, Lawrence Fishburne, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston and John Hawkes (I know, right?) rush to find answers and maybe even a cure. Considering its powerhouse cast, compelling plot (who isn’t a sucker for disease thrillers?) and that priceless look on Gwynnie’s face as she croaks, this one seems to be a winner right out of the gate.